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Ontario Tech acknowledges the lands and people of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation.

We are thankful to be welcome on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered by the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to many Indigenous nations and peoples.

We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we acknowledge that the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home.

This history is something we are all affected by because we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.

Learn more about Indigenous Education and Cultural Services

October 19, 2012

Title: Collective Learning

Speaker: Noam Miller, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University

Abstract: Animals that live in groups, including humans, also learn in groups and their learning (and other cognitive functions) are affected by interactions between individuals within the group. For example, consensus decision-making, which is common in many group-living species, requires that some individuals repress their own 'opinions' in order to remain with the group, which has an effect on their future learning and preferences. I will present a model of how individual learning occurs with the context of a group and experimental data that show how groups integrate different information held by their members. Models and studies of learning have focused almost exclusively on solitary individuals and studies of collective motion have mostly ignored learning. By integrating these two approaches, we reveal novel and fundamental dynamics of collective learning